Bruised Egos

I’d like to interrupt my blogging hiatus once again. It has taken me a while to figure out how to do it. It has been less about writer’s block and more about how much information is too much information – but I think I can trust myself to be reasonable in how I exhibit my thoughts, for the most part. And doing what I do best, it’s bound to get philosophical and deep fairly quickly.

I’ve learnt over the last little while about the uncertainty of things. How you think an event, a person or a thing will make you feel doesn’t always match up to the reality. Also: that is okay. For me, and probably for a lot of people, uncertainty is not comfortable. Lurking in the shadows, pulling at the leg of our jeans – I hear that it’s best buddies with anxiety. But uncertainty is undoubtedly present, and is therefore a concept worth wrestling with. When we play into our doubts and fears in our minds we are letting it in through a crack in the door. When we vocalise those doubts and fears we are setting it free, so to speak. The uncertainty is exposed and thrown into an open space to be examined for what it is.

I think in the last wee while, the only regret I have come up with is holding back parts of myself for fear of the outcome: how I’d be perceived, whether I would ruin the good stuff I had around me, and how things would play out. But in hindsight that is dumb; uncertainty is always present, and change is always happening. No matter what someone does in a particular moment of time, no matter how much they agonise over the could haves and would haves and should haves, nothing is stagnant. Sure, different outcomes can be achieved by different choices, but there isn’t really any sure fire way of knowing what comes next. As humans we exist in the present and only the present. But we seem to live a lot our times either in the past: reflecting, grieving, remembering, or in the future: planning, yearning, imagining. We have ideas of things that will make our lives better or more exciting. If and when we get those things we never seem to fail to think up more, newer, better things. Weirdly though for me, I seem to feel happiest when I am at peace with myself. I could be talking to someone, I could be lying on a patch of grass, I could be jumping on a trampoline or sitting a biology test, but if I feel okay in myself, I think that is when I’m closest to happy. Of course, the people in my life and the relationships I have with them make me happy too, but I have to build a solid foundation of love for myself before I can let other people in on it. Then, we can party together in my tiny house in the tree tops and talk about trifle and teach each other tongue twisters and tell me to stop please. Sometimes I get a little carried away with alliteration…

I don’t know why vulnerability is so hard for us. That is something I think that draws me to neurodiverse or “special needs” people. The layers of social expectation and interaction – that for us in the majority are really all learned behaviours over time that we observe and grow to conform to from childhood – simply don’t apply. You might meet these people and get yelled at, or spontaneously squeezed, or asked a strange question. You might get hugged. You might just get ignored. It’s fascinating. And pondering what makes us different and what makes us similar is…stimulating? The things that separate us neurologically would be differences in brain function. Socially, it would be the way that people perceive us (“normal” versus “handicapped” or “disabled” or whatever labels you subscribe to.) When you strip things like that away and simplify it all down there are two things that are true. We want to avoid suffering, and we want to experience pleasure. (Again with the Buddhist principles Abby, but he’s an emotionally knowledgable and enlightened guy. He really is.) Two very human things. Regardless of what makes us suffer, or what brings us pleasure, we can all relate to each other on this level.

Oh yeah, and the title of this blog is such because I’m sure I have a bruised ego right now. But I like what I’m learning from it, even if I don’t like how it feels. I hope to master my mind one day, or at the very least, get back to being friends with it. We have our disagreements, but we can make it work when it counts.